ART CITIES: Basel-Anouk Kruithof
Dancing is one of the things that humans have in common across cultures, geographies, and time. Dance as a way of knowing about the world has always fascinated Anouk Kruithof. It carries a transformative power where constructed ideas, different belief systems, and local, global, universal and spiritual connections appear as an embodied knowing. Dance provides an opportunity to learn about diversity and identity, and how they are produced and reproduced within culture, gender and history.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Tinguely Archive
Born 1981 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Anouk Kruithof is an artist working in Mexico City, New York and Amsterdam. Her multilayered, interdisciplinary approach encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, artist-books, text, performance, video and interventions in the public domain. In a wide-ranging research project called “Universal Tongue” (2018-), Anouk Kruithof has been studying dance as a worldwide cultural phenomenon sedimented in YouTube videos and clips, and together with her team of fifty helpers has compiled some 8,800 films. The result is a video installation, each of whose eight channels choreographs a four-hour-long selection of the most diverse dance styles for solo dancers, pairs, and groups. The films are accompanied by a four-hour-long music compilation drawn from the found film footage. The diverse modes of expression in this kaleidoscope of virtuosity, joie de vivre, and ritual enactment make it at once touching and fascinating. Also part of the project was the publication of a compendium of 1,000 dance styles from all over the world, from Abakuá-Dance (Cuba) to Zydeco (USA). Kruithof finds the film footage and images she needs on social media. Her artistic praxis is thus a reflection of how the world we inhabit has become a patchwork of digital sources and how the never-ending flood of images that we consume every day levels out the dystopian aspects of our existence. In addition to “Universal Tongue”, whose animated image sequences are both enthralling and overwhelming, and as much an invitation to linger as to join in, the exhibition at Museum Tinguely also features a second video work by Kruithof, the “Ice Cry Baby” (2017), a compilation of YouTube films that documents the ever faster calving and collapse of the world’s glaciers. The soundtrack, which kicks in only sporadically, underscores the ambivalence of the images, which veer from the almost meditative contemplation of tumultuous testimonies to climate change at one extreme to fun-fair-style spectacles vying for our attention at the other. The installation also opens a dialogue with a major work of Jean Tinguely’s late period, the “Mengele Dance of Death” (1986). Tinguely’s work centres on the last dance that all humans, irrespective of their social status, have to dance before taking their final bow. The image sequence of the Danse Macabre grew out of the visual traditions of the ‘Lay Folks’ Catechism’, which was supposed to deter poor sinners from feasting during Lent and so spare their souls from hell. The humanist visual tradition of the Dance of Death is believed to have originated during the plague epidemics of the Late Middle Ages.
Photo: Anouk Kruithof, Ice Cry Baby, 2017, video 3:00 min, video repeated 8 times over a soundtrack of 24 minutes, © Anouk Kruithof, Courtesy the artist and Museum Tinguely
Info: Curator: Roland Wetzel, Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 2, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 24/4-30/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.tinguely.ch
